Staff Picks for Black History Month: Adult Nonfiction

January 30, 2018

February is Black History Month, and to celebrate, we asked staff to recommend their must-reads for adults, young adults, and children. Staff picks for adult nonfiction follow. Look for our adult fiction, young adult, and children’s staff picks to follow next week.

“This book is giving me a lot to think about. What does it mean to be successful in America, and specifically what does success look like for a black man? What does it say about our modern culture where someone can be glamourized for dealing drugs and being incarcerated on murder charges? Gucci Mane might not be the best spokesperson for all African Americans, but no single person can be. He definitely has a distinct point of view. He speaks of his own background growing up in a drug-ridden city without positive male role models. He talks about what happens to him in pursuit of his all-saving goal: money. Like the lyrics of his raps, his memoir doesn’t back down from showing the grit and reality of his life including drugs, crime, fame, and fortune. This book might be an especially interesting and revealing read for all parents of young teens. Your children have Gucci Mane lyrics on their lips. He is idolized and emulated. He seems about a good a place as any to start with asking the hard questions about race, status, and the American dream.” – recommended by Brian W., Yardley-Makefield Branch

In a series of essays, written as a letter to his son, Coates confronts the notion of race in America and how it has shaped American history, many times at the cost of black bodies and lives. Thoughtfully exploring personal and historical events, from his time at Howard University to the Civil War, the author poignantly asks and attempts to answer difficult questions that plague modern society. In this short memoir, the Atlantic writer explains that the tragic examples of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and those killed in South Carolina are the results of a systematically constructed and maintained assault to black people – a structure that includes slavery, mass incarceration, and police brutality as part of its foundation. – recommended by Heather L, Warminster Township Free Library

Gail Lumet Buckley – daughter of actress Lena Horne – delves deep into her family history, detailing the experiences of an extraordinary African-American family from Civil War to Civil Rights. Beginning with her great-great grandfather Moses Calhoun, a house slave who used the rare advantage of his education to become a successful businessman in post-war Atlanta, Buckley follows her family’s two branches: one that stayed in the South, and the other that settled in Brooklyn. Through the lens of her relatives’ momentous lives, Buckley examines major events throughout American history. – recommended by Heather L., Warminster Township Free Library

“Host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, Trevor Noah narrates his story about life growing up in South Africa during apartheid and the freedom days that follow. Despite the serious nature of the subject matter of the culture and history of the events in his native-born country, he engages the reader with his incredible storytelling ability, wit, and humor that will surely captivate the reader.” – recommended by Kathleen L., Doylestown District Center Library

“Economic historian Edward Baptist’s compelling book goes far beyond slavery in the pre-Civil War South. Using everything from statistics to first person slave narratives, Baptist shows how deeply the enslavement of human beings affected the political and economic development of the country through more than three centuries. Detailed (the book is more than five hundred pages) and at times graphic, Baptist’s use of individual accounts and cultural background give the story interest and urgency.” – recommended by Mary Catherine B., Doylestown District Center Library

The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA at the leading edge of the feminist and civil rights movement, whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space. – recommended by Heather L. and Tracey R., Warminster Township Free Library

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells – taken without her knowledge in 1951 – became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more. This is an inspiring read and a good book for book club discussion groups. – recommended by Terri R., Riegelsville Public Library and Heather L., Warminster Township Free Library

This definitive box set includes all the landmark speeches of the great orator and American leader Martin Luther King, Jr., from his inspirational “I Have a Dream” to his fiery “Give Us the Ballot.” – recommended by Mary Catherine B., Doylestown District Center Library

The first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge – a tradition that continues today within some black populations. – recommended by Heather L., Warminster Township Free Library

Murray Dubin and Pulitzer Prize winner Dan Biddle painstakingly chronicle the life of this charismatic black leader – a “free” black whose freedom was in name only. Born in the American south, where slavery permeated everyday life, he moved north where he joined the fight to be truly free – free to vote, go to school, ride on streetcars, play baseball and even participate in July 4th celebrations. – recommended by Melva J., Township Library of Lower Southampton

Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. Studded with moments of joy, and tragedy, They Can’t Kill Us All offers a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, showing that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice. – recommended by Heather L., Warminster Township Free Library

“This is one of those books I picked up, began to read, and said to myself, “Who WROTE this?” because the prose was brilliant and the stories riveting. The who in this case is Virginia Wilkerson, who is the first African-American woman to be awarded the Pulitzer for journalism (1994). The story follows three people and their families as they grew up in the Jim Crow South and managed to escape to a slightly freer North where they were able to grow, raise families, and find the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms denied them in the old South. In some places quite hair raising. Always fascinating! All I could say as I was reading it is WOW!” – Darcy F., Free Library of New Hope and Solebury